I've been doing a lot of thinking about the use of Debian for newbies and
bewbies. Bill's directions to Pete on how to set up "My Computer" on KDE
takes care of one thing. Something like YAST would take care of another.
And something that partitioned as easily as YAST and Mandrake would be still
another.

I believe synaptic has already been mentioned on this thread. Is it
what you want? I use it to manage Fedora installs (via apt-rpm in the
background).

Of course I do not expect much sympathy from Debian users for this type of
computing. But after Ken's answer to my question about apt upgrading to new
versions of open source applications (eventually to Open Office 2.0, for
example) I marvel at what Debian is up to. It is clearly economically
suicidal for commercial distros to have apt. While Debian is considered
geekware, it has tremendous potential to the non-technically inclined.

Yes, of course, "rolling updates" completely eliminates upgrade
purchases. The concept is not totally revolutionary, though.
User-based linux distros have been doing it for some time, Debian and
Gentoo being the most prominent. I'm able to do rolling updates with
Fedora, now too, which is a hybrid user-base, commercially supported
distribution. Even commercial companies offer rolling updates under
yearly contract licensing rather than single-purchase licensing.